Vita Nuova Page 5

  ‘And? What about him?’

  ‘Nothing. They just seem to have been close. I get the impression she was ambitious. After all, apart from the child, she seemed to have no life at all beyond her studies. I just thought . . . ambitious young ladies sometimes, you know . . . shortcuts. . . .’

  ‘I thought that only happened in the entertainment industry.’

  ‘No. . . .’ The captain didn’t get out much, any more than Daniela Paoletti had. ‘It happens in all fields. In fact, the professor himself told me that competition in the academic world is ferocious and that people with the right connections tend to win out over the really brilliant.’

  ‘And would he have been the right connection for her?’

  The marshal shook his head. ‘They were only intending to take on one researcher next year, and there was the son of a politician in line for it—besides, the professor didn’t look like he’d be up to it. . . .’

  ‘Really? What do you mean? Too old?’

  ‘That, too. Never looked up from his books, I’d say. I can’t see him making a nuisance of himself with young female students. I can’t see him making a nuisance of himself with his wife—well, you shouldn’t judge. After all, the victim sounds to have been the same type—and she did have a child. But no, it was a dead end. He had an alibi anyway: He was in Naples for two days when it happened, working on something I didn’t understand with two other academics. You can tell what sort he was by the fact that it didn’t cross his mind that it was an alibi I was after, and he started telling me about this paper on whatever it was. I’d still be there now if somebody hadn’t interrupted us and saved me. Reminded me of Professor Forli. No, no . . . dead end. . . .

  ‘I talked to two women and a man in the registrar’s office, but they didn’t see that much of her. They were amazed when I told them how she died, but they didn’t have a scrap of information about any boyfriend. Not even hearsay, gossip, nothing. And as for the child’s father, they didn’t even know she had a child. I left my card. They obviously wanted to see the back of me this morning. They had an endless queue of foreign students to enrol.’

  ‘Someone must know, for heaven’s sake. Florence is supposed to be a hotbed of gossip. What’s the prosecutor saying?’

  ‘He’s saying Find the boyfriend. What else can he say? Good heavens, I see what you mean about the press. Television, as well.’

  They were driving across the Piazza della Signoria to the municipal offices in the Palazzo Vecchio. Huge groups of sweating tourists were following flags or umbrellas held aloft.

  ‘What happened at the gypsy encampment? I missed most of the news last night.’

  ‘A man was stabbed in the leg yesterday by a group of gypsy children in a bag-snatching episode near the station and then, during last night, somebody managed to get into the camp and set fire to two house trailers with a can of petrol. A little girl died.’ They got out of the car and, on the instant, a telecamera was there.

  ‘Channel three news. Can you tell us anything . . . ?’

  The captain ignored them. ‘I’m not likely to be in the office much, Guarnaccia, but you can get me on my mobile—and that press conference may well be put off until tomorrow because we’ll have to hold one about this business, as you can see.’

  ‘I imagine so. Funny . . . I’d been thinking that the murder of a well-to-do victim would get all the attention, but it’s a little gypsy girl.’

  ‘It’s not the little gypsy girl the mayor’s worrying about, it’s his political future. Keep me informed.’

  ‘I will.’ As the marshal got back into his own car, he remembered about the flat for sale. Too late. The driver started the engine. The cameraman was pushing through the tourists to hurry into the building behind the captain. A couple of youngsters in shorts and baseball caps stopped licking their ice cream and turned to stare after them. That cameraman was wasting his time. The journalists’ nickname for Captain Maestrangelo was ‘The Tomb.’

  ‘We should have found it before, of course.’ The technician exhibited the bullet in a small plastic bag.

  It was hardly surprising. The bedside cabinet was antique, deeply carved, and damaged by ancient woodworm scars.

  ‘It had literally disappeared into the woodwork! If we hadn’t known it had to be here, we’d have been hard put. . . .’

  ‘The prosecutor will be pleased.’ Not that the marshal himself wasn’t, it was just that he wanted to be alone in the room and he hadn’t yet had the chance, apart from a very few moments yesterday. Too many people all over everything.

  If the people in this family told him nothing, then perhaps the house itself would tell him things.

  The windows were closed and shuttered and the lights on. It seemed gloomy for a few moments after the forensic people had taken their powerful lights away, but he waited and the effect soon passed.

  Plastic sheeting had been put over the bed and the floor beside it so that the sister could be brought in here yesterday. The marshal removed these now and put them out in the corridor.

  Then he stood still for a long time, looking.

  The tumbled, snowy bed, red floor tiles, smooth with centuries of wax and wear, the few pieces of furniture, dark and heavy. It might be a convent cell . . . except for that one area of disorder, the messy trail leading to a chalk outline. Broken glass from the photo frame. The picture, with its frame and backing, had been laid flat on the bedside table to be photographed by the technicians. A little blond girl in white, a First Communion picture with a small round hole in it. The marshal looked at the child Daniela. She’d been very thin then, and her big solemn eyes were ringed with dark shadows. Nobody in this family seemed to be in the best of health, one way or another. There were two other photographs by the bedside lamp, one of Daniela holding her baby in his christening robe, the other a more recent one of little Piero pushing a wooden truck with red wheels. Yesterday’s search had turned up no other photographs. On the floor above, in Daniela’s big tidy study, the marshal had found a desk diary which contained nothing personal at all. There was the odd dental appointment, tutorials for her thesis, reminders about picking up dry-cleaning. If the man was married, then he had certainly been able to count on her discretion. It looked as if she would succeed in taking her secret to the grave. At the very top of the tower was an attic. It was empty.

  ‘She never really talked to us.’

  An attic without secrets, a diary without secrets.

  She had a secret, though.

  The child’s bedroom was small and cheerful, the bedclothes turned back to air, a fur animal of some sort with a pointed nose propped on the pillow. A shelf of picture books. The bathroom was tidy, mostly white. Towels, some white, some dark blue, were folded on the brass rail, all except a used one lying on a linen basket.

  A quiet, studious woman had got up, washed and dressed her little boy, given him his breakfast on the floor below, and taken him down to her sister. Had she then come up and taken a shower? Possibly. She’d still been wearing some sort of white robe when she died, and she hadn’t had time to make her bed. This was no place for a murder. It was all so quiet, so clean and simple, so . . . innocent.

  Nothing is what it seems. Even the house phone. . . .

  He looked again at the chalk outline of her body.

  Perhaps she tried to raise herself to reach the telephone but sank down just as he fired at her head the first time.

  And still, what help was it to know that? Somebody had come up here and she had opened the door to her killer. Had she known him? She must have. She had opened the door to him in her robe, a thin, white robe, silk, maybe. There was no house phone up here, and he hadn’t seen one on any floor yesterday. He walked to the window above the entrance and opened it up. Hard to recognize anyone from directly above at this height, but somebody familiar, a voice calling up a greeting. . . . He leaned out.

  There was a man standing down there.

  His hair was dark. He wasn’t in uniform. He was smo
king. Suddenly, he looked left and right, tossed the cigarette, and ducked under the police tape to get in.

  The marshal closed the window and started down. There was little point in trying to do it silently on the stone stairs. How the devil this man had got in was a mystery since the grounds were still full of carabinieri, but the marshal was more interested in who than how. When he reached the ground floor the man was there, looking around.

  ‘For God’s sake!’

  ‘Morning, Guarnaccia.’

  ‘What the devil are you doing here—and how did you get in?’

  ‘Oh, you know me,’ Nesti grinned.

  ‘Yes, I do, and it’s lucky for you the prosecutor’s not here or he’d put you away for this. Get out.’

  ‘Come on, Guarnaccia, give me something, anything, for tomorrow’s paper and I’ll go. Besides, I knew the proc wasn’t here and I got in down near that cottage where they were searching until ten minutes or so ago. Wall’s a bit broken down there—I’ve ruined my shoes.’

  Nesti’s obsession with being first on crime scenes was only equalled by his passion for fine clothes and shoes.

  ‘Get out, Nesti.’

  ‘I’ve helped you out before now.’

  That was true. Nesti had been a crime reporter on The Nazione for longer than the marshal had been in Florence, and he knew just about everything there was to know about the place.

  ‘Besides, I can’t get out the way I got in, because the wall’s two metres higher from the ground on the inside—and I can hardly go out the front gates. There’s one of your cars parked there.’

  ‘Nesti!’

  ‘You’ll be sorry if you don’t help me out, because I’ve got something on this rogue.’

  ‘On whoever killed her?’

  ‘Maybe—though, if I’m right, you haven’t a hope of catching him. No, I meant the owner of this place, Paoletti. You won’t have met him, he’s in hospital.’

  ‘And you have? Don’t tell me you’ve been to the hospital—’

  ‘No, no, no. A story from years back. He’s gone up in the world, judging by the size of this place.’

  ‘Nesti. . . .’ It was true that he was often useful, but he had this casual way of throwing out information so that you were never sure if he was serious—or, to be exact, you were always sure he couldn’t be serious, but he usually was. There was something about his laconic delivery and the fact that his eyes were always squeezed almost shut—probably against his own cigarette smoke—that made everything he said seem comic.

  ‘So: I leave here with you in your car, having been sent for by you to give you some background information on Paoletti. And you ought to give those two on the gates a bollocking for not noticing me coming in, to make it more convincing. That’s the first problem solved.’

  ‘And what’s the next problem?’

  ‘I told you: something for the crime page for tomorrow. I give you the goods on Paoletti and you give it back to me and I write it up. Everybody’s happy. Only, if you don’t mind, we’ll do that over lunch because I’m starving and I haven’t a bean.’

  ‘You shouldn’t spend it all on clothes.’

  ‘You’re right. And now I’m going to have to buy another pair of these shoes. We’ll eat at Paszkowski. I need cigarettes and, besides, everything else decent is closed in August.’

  ‘You’ve given up giving up smoking, then?’

  ‘Not at all. I never give up giving up. Just giving it a rest for a bit.’

  ‘Well, we’re not going anywhere for lunch—I haven’t time to stop for lunch.’

  Not for more than a couple of sandwiches, anyway. But in the end he agreed to have supper with Nesti. He might really have something useful to say, but the truth was that the marshal would have supped with the devil himself to avoid eating alone at home.

  It had been like that when he was a lad. They never went on holiday, but his school friends did, and he’d hang around the house, not knowing what to do, morose and lonely. His mother was too busy to have any patience with him.

  ‘Don’t stand in the middle of the kitchen, I’ve the floor to mop. Go and play with Nunziata or else help your father with the hens.’

  But his sister was two years older and didn’t want him around. His father was quiet and patient, but it was easy to see that he got on better on his own.

  Before long, he’d be back in the kitchen.

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Here. Have a slice of bread.’

  She’d cut a thick crust and put a slice from a big tomato on it with salt and a drop of oil.

  ‘Here. Now, get out from under my feet. Why don’t you go and call for little Beppe. He’ll play with you.’

  ‘He’s only eight!’

  But he would go, in the end, and an instant friendship would be improvised and last through the long, lonely month of August until everybody was back.

  He dropped Nesti further down the road where his car was parked.

  ‘Eight o’clock at Paszkowski, then. In the meantime, I think I’ll go and take the waters. Good for my liver.’

  ‘What . . . ?’

  At five in the afternoon, the marshal was in his office. He’d looked in on the two lads in the duty room, one of whom was at the console talking to the motorbike patrol.

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘All quiet, Marshal.’

  ‘All right. Look up this name, will you? See if there’s anything on our records.’

  ‘Right . . . isn’t this the name—’

  ‘Yes. Bring me anything you find right away—and if there are any reports of incidents involving gypsies, tell me. The captain wants to avoid whipping up hysteria— especially in the press.’

  ‘Right. You know another child died?’

  ‘No. What happened?’

  ‘It’s just come through. The little brother of the girl who died in the fire. He was badly burned. Died about an hour ago, poor kid. Let’s hope that’ll shame the anti-gypsy campaigners into shutting up.’

  The marshal doubted it. Two gypsies less would be their only thought. He sat down behind his desk and sighed. It was an intractable problem around which emotions ran high, interest in facts low. Each time a small incident occurred, trouble would flare up— literally this time—and now it was a political football.

  As a child, he had never really believed his parents’ warnings about the gypsies, even though they made him shiver under the bedclothes on windy nights. Why should they steal children? It was just one of those fairy stories they tell to keep you frightened into not wandering off or staying out in the dark. But gypsies do steal children, though not usually in Italy, and teach them to beg and steal. And even to stab people in the leg if they don’t cough up, apparently. . . .

  He took out his notebook and opened it. Talk about intractable problems.

  Costanza Donati, a good sort of woman you’d be glad to have as a neighbour, hadn’t been able to help much as far as Daniela Paoletti’s death, or even life, was concerned. She had been more than helpful, though, on another problem. Her husband was a doctor, a consultant, and she had promised to talk to him about getting Nunziata’s therapy done in Florence if she needed it.

  ‘It’s not his field but, don’t worry, he’ll make the arrangements as soon as you give the word.’

  ‘I’d really appreciate it. I’ve heard it makes people ill. She shouldn’t be alone when she can be here with us. You’re very kind.’

  ‘Not at all. It’s nothing compared to what you did for us.’

  ‘How’s your son doing now?’

  They had talked for a while, sitting on a bench in the shade. The Donatis’ garden was set high up, a good four metres higher than the road. There was a pretty good view of the top two floors of the tower from here.

  ‘Too far to hear anything, though, I imagine.’

  ‘I couldn’t say. I might have heard something if that wretched bulldozer hadn’t been going. I can’t see what they’re up to over there, but I’m willin
g to bet they’re wrecking that beautiful old place.’

  A very good sort of woman.

  ‘I must say, though, Marshal, to be honest, I don’t know if I’d have noticed or recognized gunshots, anyway. I’ve only ever heard them on television or at the cinema. I enjoy a good crime story, if it’s not too violent. Would it have been very loud?’

  ‘No. Not like on television at all. Still, it’s not really the time of the shooting that’s a problem, it’s whether you saw anybody, and you’ve already said not. Had you been out here some time, by the way? Perhaps the carabiniere who came over yesterday asked you that?’

  ‘Yes, he did, and I told him I was out here by nine-ish. It’s a long job, that and the dead-heading. It’s my husband’s job, really. He’s the gardener. It’s just that there was a bit of an emergency that morning and he left much earlier than usual. I saw the young woman’s car going back in, and then she came running out screaming.’

  She had gone inside and then come out through the French windows with a tray. Something cool to drink. The sound of pouring liquid, the clink of ice cubes, birdsong, and the smell of grass. It must be nice to have a garden. Lot of work, though.

  ‘How is the family taking it, Marshal? It must have been such a shock. I can’t say I see much of them, but they all go off to church together on Sunday mornings—I rarely go myself, I must confess, and my husband’s a regular Florentine priest-hater. She was so young . . . the little boy always sits on her knee in the car. That’s really the only time I see them. Elio and I have breakfast out here in good weather. How’s the sister coping? My goodness, she was in a state.’

  ‘She’s calmer today.’

  ‘Even so, it’s a worry. That little boy will need her. . . .’

  ‘Yes. I just wish I knew who the father was.’

  ‘That I don’t know. And I’ve never seen her with a man.I’m sorry.’

  The marshal was sorry too. He closed his notebook now and sat staring at the map of his quarter on the opposite wall. There was precious little to add to his case notes from that interview, other than that they all went to church together. Not entirely a waste of time, though, if her husband would help out with Nunziata. The family should all be together, especially in times of trouble. He’d telephoned Teresa right away to tell her.